1. Technical Field
The embodiment herein generally relates to search engines and search methodologies in a network. The embodiment herein more particularly relates to a method for personalizing information retrieval in a communication network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Collation of information has been made accessible with relative ease from the onset of networking communication devices. Generally, individuals use search tools provided over the internet to search for specific information. The search results include information posted for academic, commercial or other purposes. The individuals then streamline the results using various options available in the search engine according to the requirements.
Social search is a concept within the internet search community which has received a delayed attention. On a broad level, social searching involves searching for people within a group of registered users with certain relevance depending on the search criteria or keywords. Many ideas have been proposed for accomplishing the social search, but most fall short for one reason or another. One problem is that searching amongst people who are not in the immediate network is always difficult and inconclusive. Secondly, handling the context of a query becomes important especially in a social search as because accuracy depends upon connecting keywords to relevant people. To provide contextually relevant results (of likely people who can help), requires a lot of information about users. Also it demands, the ability to manage and make sense of all the information that may not conform to a pre-defined structure and understand the right parameters to select the subset of users relevant to a search query. For example: if a user is a professional painter and is searching for information regarding various patterns in painting, then the results would be enhanced by knowing that he is a professional painter. However, if the same query was asked by a novice in painting, then the response would be different. A user's age may also be an appropriate factor to be considered when searching for information, like while seeking advice in medical related problems or searching vacation destinations, but not when searching for instructions on how to install some gaming software.
Most of the known computer-implemented social search tools perform searches for people depending upon the keywords lexical match entered in the “Search Box” and display the results in the same manner as they search for documents/authored content. If a user has a sound knowledge in some subject and has not mentioned in his profile regarding his skill sets, it is very obvious that he/she will not be listed in the result set. For example: If a user is a professional painter and has interest in developing graphic software but has not mentioned that in his interest's area in his profile, then he/she may not be in the result set which is queried for finding people related to graphic software development. Thus, the search is carried on a known set of parameters which constitute data in a structured manner.
Also, once presented with a set of results, the user needs to determine the appropriate person to contact from a given set of results. People naturally find ease in contacting people they know or people who know someone directly or through some other person. Most of the existing people search tools do not provide the result set to user in a way that allows the user to easily determine the degree of separation with the listed users.
Using the known search tools, the user is also often unsure of the relevance of the people returned in the result set and the reason why they were included. People are often organized to work in groups on particular projects or in areas of expertise, or both. Thus, users are often searching for other people who are working on a particular project or who have particular skills. These groups of people can be expressed in a number of ways including common department names, common security profile groups, and common distribution lists. However, the conventional search tools do not provide the result set in a way that allows the user to easily determine the relevance of the people returned in the result set. Thus there must be a provision to allow questioner to select and define the most relevant set of users to answer his query.
The abovementioned shortcomings, disadvantages and problems are addressed herein and which will be understood by reading and studying the following specification.